Featured Articles and Journals: 28-day meditation challenge

I am already pretty happy at work. I like what I do, and I like the people I do it with. I know exactly what I'll be doing, but I never know what I'll be doing. (I'm a newspaper editor, and the schedule is the same every day but the content is...

Today is March 1. Those of us who took part in Sharon Salzberg’s 28-Day Meditation Challenge are probably wondering how our practice will continue now that the month of February is over. Commitment leads to evaluation. What did we see, and where do...

"Don't fight the darkness. Don't even worry about the darkness. Turn on the light & the darkness goes. Turn up that light of pure consciousness: Negativity goes.Now you say, 'That sounds so sweet'.It sounds too sweet. But it's a real...

I am annoyed with one of my co-workers. I feel my body tighten at the sound of his laugh, an email he forwarded. I am ready with a sigh before he even opens his mouth to speak. Even the sight of his slightly too-short Dockers starts my eyes rolling.

So, this week, as part of the 28-Day Meditation Challenge, I stuck with the close technique (from Shambhala), and then mixed in whatever Salzberg recommended. Mindfulness of the body or whatever. Body scans, focusing on sensation, walking...

Before I started meditating I took yoga classes for several years. I was no poster girl for yoga, but I did develop a familiarity with my body's mechanics. So I was pretty smug when I was introduced to mindfulness of body. I knew my body....

The process of concentration is one of gathering. We gather all our scattered attention and energy, and we bring it together, we bring it home. The result of that gathering is that we attain access to all the energy that is not usually available to...

Coming back to Sharon Salzberg's Real Happiness practice again feels like Spring Training in baseball; I'm back to working on the basics, the skills drills. I've got nothing else to do for 28 days but refine the bedrock of the game, the basics of...

As we come to the end of February and the end of the 28-Day Meditation Challenge I am thinking about techniques to keep the practice going and alive in our daily lives. As Sharon Salzberg writes in the final chapter Keeping the Practice Going...

I imagine that if he knew I was sending him lovingkindness, he would mock it. Loudly. With a distinctive heh-heh-heh. Sarcasm is a deadly defense. It keeps people at an arm's length because they won't risk handing you the dagger you'll use to stab...

I'm infatuated... and I can't think of anything else but the object of my obsession, er... I mean, affection. Even writing this post is troublesome as all I want to do is spend time with my sweetheart, to treasure the joy, pain, decorum and...

It's Day 14 of the 28-Day Meditation Challenge and it also happens to be Valentine's day OR Singles' Awareness Day, depending on which one you prefer to celebrate. I'm going to celebrate love today. Corny, silly, nasty, naughty, bodacious,...

How fitting, on a day when I was set to write about the practices outlined for Week Two of the 28-day Meditation Challenge, about body scans and physical sensations, that the physical world would thwart me, in the form of TimeWarner's cables.

“As much as I definitely enjoy solitude, I wouldn’t mind spending a little time with you”
My practice today: Day 11 of The 28 Day Meditation Challenge
Settling then floating
Settling then floating
Breathing then thinking
Thinking then...